Contesting powerful knowledge: the primary geography curriculum as an articulation between academic and children%s (ethno‐) geographies

Abstract

The argument has been propounded that academic disciplines and school subjects provide a powerful, authoritative knowledge which is key to enabling children to better understand the world in which they live. Inherent in this perspective is that children%s experience, knowledge and understanding are poorly formed and of limited everyday use and value. Yet it is appreciated that children%s naïve knowledge can be a pedagogic starting point to initiate them into academic subjects. While appreciating the purpose and roles of academic subjects, this article challenges these assumptions, arguing that children%s ethno‐knowledges provide powerful learning bases of equivalent authority to subjects. Using the example of younger children%s everyday or ethno‐geography, the case is that children bring to school powerful (geographical) knowledge of their own. This can and should be recognised and valued in dialogue with authoritative (geographical) subject knowledge, not as subservient to it. It is argued that this perspective goes beyond that of the child/subject co‐construction of knowledge to interrelate the developmental nature of children%s everyday (geographical) learning with (geography) sense‐of‐subject evolution. This case is set in the context of geography but is applicable to other school subjects, where children%s and subjects' powerful knowledges can mutually engage with and enhance each other.

Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools

“…Perhaps the most interesting difficulty is the relationship between the realist, objective knowledge that Young stresses exists outside our direct experience of the world and the potential of everyday knowledge coming from students' own experiences and perceptions. Catling and Martin (2011) pointed to this difficulty in relation to the childcentered primary school teaching. An important line of thought as this project develops is to link the notion of powerful knowledge to everyday geographies, for instance via the recent Young People's Geographies project that explicitly linked students, teachers, and academics in curriculum-making activity (Biddulph 2011).…”

Giving younger children voice in primary geography: empowering pedagogy – a personal perspective

“…Fran Martin and I have contended that children construct their own ethno-knowledge of places, spaces and environments from life experience À their folk context (Catling, 2003;Catling & Martin, 2011;Martin, 2008). They develop environmental knowledge International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 357 and life skills and construct values and attitudes concerning their experience of the world from first and second hand engagement (Alexander, 2010).…”

“…My challenge to this perspective is that we stop othering and subordinating children. I contend that in doing this we empower our pedagogy rather than inhibit it, by bringing children 'back in', to adapt Michael Young's phrase (Catling & Martin, 2011;Young, 2008) as co-learner participants, working with, not working to, their teachers.…”

“…This is a question as pertinent for primary as for secondary teachers. Critical pedagogy extols the role of the teacher but demands that it is a dialectical role and, in Alexander's term, dialogic (Alexander, 2008), taking into account the everyday realities of learners, connecting with them through their current experiences and understandings, drawing on, accepting and valuing these, and engaging the learners' authority with subject authority in order to enhance their learning (Catling & Martin, 2011). The teacher is required to know and understand the curriculum subjects and topics they teach, to understand and relate to their learners (including themselves) and to teach responsively, engagingly and to empower the learner through learning.…”

Teachers' perspectives on curriculum making in Primary Geography in England

“…This connected with the children's familiar environment, providing the opportunity for teachers to draw on the children's everyday geographies (Catling, 2005(Catling, , 2011bMartin, 2008;Catling & Martin, 2011): [It] has shown me how children are part of geography in their daily lives, and that they are aware of many issues relating to sustainability and their immediate environment at their own level. [F/FS] While the teachers drew occasionally on children's awareness and knowledge in their previous geography topics, largely through elicitation activities, they were required in this project to engage the children more fully, such as in considering and agreeing what might be studied and investigated and where this could be done locally.…”